'It may be merely flirtation or folly that inspires you; but beware, Annot, how you treat me thus, and remember that lovers' quarrels are not _always_ love renewed.' He felt and feared that a gulf which might never be bridged over was widening suddenly between them. Had she asked him just then, with all his anger, to kiss her once and forgive her, he would have yielded too probably; but the little beauty, all unlike her usually pliant, soft, and clinging self, held haughtily aloof and said: 'Am I to give you back your ring, and relinquish all that it involves?' 'No, Annot, no, no,' exclaimed Roland, not yet prepared for such a climax. With an angry sob in her slender throat she tried to twist it off, but in vain; and they regarded each other with a curiously mingled expression which they never forgot--he sorrowfully and indignantly; she saucily and defiantly. 'Have you anything more unpleasant to say to me, Roland?' she asked. 'Only that I begin to wish, Annot--oh, my God--that we had never, never met!' 'Indeed! Good-bye.' 'Good-bye.' She swept away. What a change--was it witchcraft?--had come ever the once playful, childlike, and winning little Annot! Roland's heart was sick and crushed, and he began to have a growing and unpleasant suspicion that he had made, as he thought, 'a confounded fool of himself.' 'Thank Heaven, Hester! I shall soon have the sea rolling between me and this place,' said he, when, after a time, he told his cousin, the early playmate and sweetheart of other days, the story of this interview and his complaint against Annot. 'Regrets are useless; we cannot change the past; but I have neither the inclination nor the capacity to face all the circumstances that seem to surround me in Earlshaugh now.' 'Why has he addressed me in his distress, and on this subject?' thought Hester almost angrily; 'how can I sympathize with him in the matter? And he comes to me at a time, too, when I know we may be soon parted for ever, and when my thoughts are as full of him as they were in that old time that can return no more.' Piqued at and disappointed with Annot, a curious and confusing emotion came more than once into the mind of Roland--one described by a Scottish writer as feeling 'that had he not, and had he been, and if he could he might--in line, he thought the medley which many a man thinks when he knows that he loves one, and only _one_; but under suasion and pressure would find it just possible to yield to _other_ distractions.' Annot did not afford him many opportunities of recurring to their first quarrel or effacing its memory; and from that hour she kept indignantly and sullenly aloof, as much as she could in courtesy do, from Maude and Hester--to their surprise--spending most of her time in the apartments and society of Mrs. Lindsay.